JD Vance Expresses Concerns Over Accuracy of Pentagon Briefings on Iran War
USA – US vice president JD Vance has in numerous occasions expressed concerns over the accuracy of Pentagon briefings on Iran war, directly to Donald Trump, according to a report on Monday by The Atlantic.
A group of Vance’s advisors said that Vance presented the concerns as his own rather than directly accusing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs Chairman Dan Caine of misleading Trump.
Trump has repeatedly echoed talking points put out by Hegseth and Caine, claiming that the US has “totally” destroyed Iran’s military, including its air force and navy, while brushing aside concerns about the military losses Iran inflicted on US assets in the region.
That has included burning through US stockpiles of missile interceptors by launching wave after wave of cheap drones and comparably inexpensive missiles at US and allied positions across the region.
“The United States Munitions Stockpiles have, at the medium and upper medium grade, never been higher or better – As was stated to me today, we have a virtually unlimited supply of these weapons,” Trump said in a March 2 social media post.
“Wars can be fought ‘forever,’ and very successfully, using just these supplies (which are better than other countries finest arms!),” he added.
Independent analyses have clashed with that bravado, however.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) think tank released a report last week in which it estimated that it will take up to four years to replenish missile stocks to pre-war levels due to long production times and competition from other nations. That is on top of the fact that pre-war inventories were already low when the war began.
“Even before the Iran war, stockpiles were deemed insufficient for a peer competitor fight,” the CSIS report said. “That shortfall is now even more acute, and building stockpiles to levels adequate for a war with China will take additional time.”
The findings are largely in line with what anonymous sources familiar with US intelligence assessments told The Atlantic.
Those sources further said that the Pentagon’s repeated insistence, echoed by Trump, that the US has severely degraded Iran’s military does not comport with the US’s own intelligence.
The intelligence suggests that Iran continues to control about two-thirds of its air force, the majority of its ballistic missile capabilities, and most of its fast boats, which it has used to lay mines and attack commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz.
Since a ceasefire between the US and Iran went into effect on April 7, Iran has gained access to roughly half of its ballistic missile launchers, people familiar with the intelligence assessment told The Atlantic.
Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell told The Atlantic that defense officials “consistently provide the president with the complete, unvarnished picture.”
An anonymous senior Trump administration official told the news outlet that the president has no qualms with the information the Pentagon has provided to him about the war.
